on RFD-TV. Cable systems differ but on Direct TV one can find RFD TV. This channel focuses on country living and has great programming on natural horsemanship. What Dr. Miler called the "Revolution in Horsemanship" is only a click on the remote away from many Americans thanks to this channel.
But the fact that this channel can exist illustrates something very important that is happening in our nation right now. There is a real movement, a real desire, a real revolution going on with many young people who seek a return to the soil and to get back in touch with what sustains us--our food.
Today's revolutionaries don't throw bombs, they plant bulbs. Though they bear some resemblance to the radicals of the 1960's, they are not a generation seeking "Flower Power." They seek tomato power, broccoli power, squash power, corn power, and their radicalism is best shown with their desire for egg power.
For much of the history of civilization the most radical thing a person could do, absent taking up arms, was to utter words of criticism against the government. In America today such an act is not only not radical, it is blase, predictable, and frankly, boring. Today's true radical does not waste time with such frivolity. Politics, per se, still has a place for many Americans, but more and more people are coming to the conclusion that, while their are some differences in the two major parties, the reality is that, despite these differences, they both are simply boot licking, shoe shine boys for our biggest corporations and wealthiest citizens.
It does not matter which party controls the government. The mustangs are still rounded up. The grasslands are replaced by corn fields, often owned by corporate farms. The small livestock farmer still cannot compete with the factory farms where livestock and workers both toil to no end for themselves. The family farm has gone the way of the full service gas station. Consumers are treated with such contempt that we are not even allowed to know if the food we are served up each day is genetically modified. Our national diet grows more and more unhealthy and as a nation we face an epidemic of metabolic disorder that will likely lead to an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes. We are denied the simple pleasure of tasting pork from a hog that was actually allowed to mature instead of being modified and managed until it can reach market weight in its very short, very miserable life. We are fed so many antibiotics in our meat that antibiotic resistance might be the least of our future health concerns.
The paragraph set out above might be described by some as radical. It most certainly is not. Were it truly radical someone would be trying to keep it from being read or even written. No, strong words are not radical in America.
Growing your own food is radical. Raising your own chickens is radical. Seeking to give your children whole milk is radical. Planting a garden instead of a lawn in your subdivision is radical. Raising free range livestock is radical.
In America today, no one will seek to suppress the words that come out of one's mouth. But the full force of the government will fall down on those that seek to produce what they put in their mouths. Zoning laws and "health" codes are used to keep us living in uniform patches of banal, ticky tack houses and making sure that we maintain our health by being fueled with corporate produced high fructose corn syrup instead of deadly back yard chicken eggs.
My grandmothers raised their own chickens, gathered their eggs, cut their heads off, plucked their feathers and fried their flesh golden brown. Try doing that today. If you are lucky enough to live away from society's prying eyes you can. For the overwhelming number of Americans that could never be done.
And the strangest thing is that neither of my grandmothers looked like communists, or even hippies, to me.
Must have been to young to know better, I guess.
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